This Does Not Make Any Sense AT ALL!
- Don’t you hate it when that happens?
- In the Profit And Loss screen, you have selected a date range covering just a few days
- You are ever so happy that you can see the PPC Cost per day.
- Now you change the date range to one that spans a few weeks, and suddenly your daily PPC figures disappear, to be replaced by a bigger number every once in a while.
- What gives?
Change Is The Only Constant In Life
Here is a helpdesk discussion which will shed some light as to why that happens:
- Hey, do you guys have a good article on why PPC shows up under Product expenses when you look at certain weeks but doesn’t show up at all when looking at a month which includes that week?
- Yes.
- The reason is that we want to avoid a situation where there is NO PPC expense at all for certain periods. Let me explain:
- When Amazon charges you PPC expenses when you exceed your credit limit (usually $500), you may be charged every few days and the charge will contain the incurred expense of a few days preceding the date of the charge.
- If any of those charges appear within the selected period, we show the amount which was charged, on the date when it was charged. That amount is calculated by Amazon, and usually will be slightly above $500.
- If in profit and loss you select a date range where there was no such charge at all (because you have not exceeded your $500 credit limit), rather than showing you NO PPC expenditure at all, we inject our own calculated daily expenditure.
- This is then an incurred (but not yet billed) daily expense and will be whatever amount you have effectively incurred each day.
- This has the effect of leveling the PPC expenditure for such periods when you would not have exceeded your $500 credit limit
- Hopefully, that makes sense to you.
- Yes, that makes perfect sense – I had a feeling it was something like that. My poor accountant is tearing her hair out.. this will make her feel better
- Make sure she understands that the daily incurred expense is not a BILLED expense, but an actual incurred expense, some of which will be either totally or partially offset by the next billed tranche of $500+
- What we are attempting to do is to avoid giving you an inflated profit which has no PPC component, because none was billed. The fact of the matter is that even if it has not yet been billed, you must accrue some amount which has been incurred already.
- Right. Got it…
